>”Dame Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics and master of Churchill College, Cambridge, said the comments were “terrifying” and “quite damaging” and questioned which research Birbalsingh was referring to in suggesting that girls had an intrinsic lack of appetite for maths and physics.”
Seems like she’s doing the job they wanted her to do.
As a woman who does hard maths for a living, the only thing I dislike about it is having to deal with inane comments like this.
There’s a really great XKCD comic where it shows both a boy and a girl solving a problem on the board. When the boy gets it wrong, the caption is ‘you’re bad at maths!’, and when the girl gets it wrong, the caption is ‘girls are bad at maths!’.
And as I’ve got older I’ve realised the only thing that stood in the way of my mathematical ability was my self confidence.
>Katharine Birbalsingh
It is like they sliced that bit that makes a person human, out of her brain.
I know it’s not really the point but the physics A-level doesn’t even have any hard maths in it, they can’t assume that you’re also taking a maths A-level so they have to leave out any interesting physics that makes use of things like calculus or linear algebra, or include it but without any of the mathematical detail, which makes it seems arbitrary and confusing.
How about we make maths easier so it’s more inclusive.
As a physics teacher, in an ‘average’ school, who teaches both GCSE top sets and A level, the biggest factor in retention to A level is that girls are generally far more literate than boys.
This means they have significantly more options and take a much more diverse range of subjects. High ability girls generally can basically choose anything they want. The boys, even higher ability ones, who have much poorer English grades, are far more limited in their available selection. This means the physics A level class has a higher proportion of boys. They aren’t any better at maths, they just can’t write as well.
In terms of GCSE and A Level attainment there’s no difference. It’s not that they dislike maths, they usually just take a more diverse range of subjects including maths or physics, but aren’t forced to ‘specialise’.
At least [according to this study](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1905779116#sec-3) , it’s less that girls ‘*dislike ‘hard maths’’* more that they’re relatively so much better at language based subjects they naturally chose those, naturally because most people choose what they’re best at.
Easy to say that and not go into why that could be the case. Sounds like the social mobility head is wholly inept and needs to be replaced. You can’t just say girls don’t like maths without looking into the reasons.
Rampant attention-seeker Katharine Birbalsingh is at it again I see.
That guy needs a different goddamn job… what an uneducated-arse. and I do not care how many initials he has after his fucking name.
[deleted]
Anyone else basically okay with maths but really couldn’t grasp physics? At A level I got an easy A at the former but got told to swing my hook at the latter.
From experience in a somewhat rural/green belt area, my year in 6th had 9 students, 8 b 1 g, she didn’t stay for long. And I don’t blame her, I barely did. That’s not really a comment on the content, it’s not that bad really if you enjoy it anyway, a big factor. maths in physics is not that bad really.
But it does conjure unbearable personalities
I’m sure no one could have predicted this, how could there be differences between different genders? It’s like each gender adapted in different way for different req.
Physics A-level has basically no actual maths. They make up fake nonesense to substitute for actual maths as they’ve tried so hard to take the actual maths out of it. This is just journalist nonesense.
I’m a chemistry A level teacher. There’s also ‘hard maths’ in that. All my classes are over 60% girls and they have no issues with maths.
I do agree there is an issue with girls choosing physics. But its not the math
I remember the girls in my A-level physics/maths courses were fairly diverse in terms of social circle. From the nerdy ones you’d expect, to the uber social and popular ones. Pretty sure they’re all doing very well for themselves now, and bloody good for them.
I think many people shun these subjects because they are hard, but boys are encouraged to go for it anyway as a sort of challenge, whereas girls either don’t have that reinforcement or are discouraged in favour of softer subjects.
Therefore you end up with a gender imbalance because outside of the people that want to be there, you have more boys who are conditioned to be there to prove themselves.
My daughter took maths, physics and biology at A-level. After a couple of months they told her she had to drop physics because she wasn’t good enough at the maths. Rather than help her improve they kicked her off the course. Probably to maintain their results.
She ended up going in a completely different direction but it’s that sort of thing that will harm young women who try to study physics.
God I’m so tired of this argument in the comments. People choose. Women choose to go to social sciences.
There’s more women than boys now at university too. Why is there still complaining? You literally have free choice to both sections of the sex at what ultimately is, an even playing field. With countless studies showing girls outclass boys. Why are we expecting equality of outcome at the end, when the results are completely different.
weird, when I was doing physics A-level 2009-2011, they removed the requirement to do an A-level maths alongside it and removed all aspects of calculus from the course, i.e., they removed all the hard maths!
This inadvertently made the course annoying to deal with as some of the proofs and explanations were more contrived and obscure. The girls liked the mechanics in the Maths A-level on the other hand which had plenty of ‘difficult’ maths.
The Physics is harder than the maths, as someone with a Physics degree, people tend to do better when the exams are maths focused (“show that this equation comes out after differentiating” for 3 pages kind of questions) as opposed to Physics problem solving focused questions. For example, vector mechanics is easy mathematically, but knowing how to set up the formula for the context at hand is the difficult part.
Sometimes people blur the distinction between problem solving and maths so they may actually mean the opposite when expressing their distaste for the subject.
I’m a Polish waitress (I know, how stereotypical of me). I regularly teach British educated teens and people in their 20s how to work out 10% of something. Their minds are BLOWN when I tell the you just move the decimal point. If they don’t even know how to divide numbers by 10 no fucking wonder they’re staying away from subjects that require math skills. And this 100% a failure of our educational system, not their own choice.
23 comments
>”Dame Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics and master of Churchill College, Cambridge, said the comments were “terrifying” and “quite damaging” and questioned which research Birbalsingh was referring to in suggesting that girls had an intrinsic lack of appetite for maths and physics.”
Exactly. Citation *motherfucking* needed.
[Katharine Birbalsingh](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/katharine-birbalsingh-head-liz-truss-michaela-community-school-alan-milburn-b959730.html), appointed by the government as its social mobility commissioner, who appears regularly on GB News? She has regressive views about the roles of women?
Seems like she’s doing the job they wanted her to do.
As a woman who does hard maths for a living, the only thing I dislike about it is having to deal with inane comments like this.
There’s a really great XKCD comic where it shows both a boy and a girl solving a problem on the board. When the boy gets it wrong, the caption is ‘you’re bad at maths!’, and when the girl gets it wrong, the caption is ‘girls are bad at maths!’.
And as I’ve got older I’ve realised the only thing that stood in the way of my mathematical ability was my self confidence.
>Katharine Birbalsingh
It is like they sliced that bit that makes a person human, out of her brain.
I know it’s not really the point but the physics A-level doesn’t even have any hard maths in it, they can’t assume that you’re also taking a maths A-level so they have to leave out any interesting physics that makes use of things like calculus or linear algebra, or include it but without any of the mathematical detail, which makes it seems arbitrary and confusing.
How about we make maths easier so it’s more inclusive.
As a physics teacher, in an ‘average’ school, who teaches both GCSE top sets and A level, the biggest factor in retention to A level is that girls are generally far more literate than boys.
This means they have significantly more options and take a much more diverse range of subjects. High ability girls generally can basically choose anything they want. The boys, even higher ability ones, who have much poorer English grades, are far more limited in their available selection. This means the physics A level class has a higher proportion of boys. They aren’t any better at maths, they just can’t write as well.
In terms of GCSE and A Level attainment there’s no difference. It’s not that they dislike maths, they usually just take a more diverse range of subjects including maths or physics, but aren’t forced to ‘specialise’.
At least [according to this study](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1905779116#sec-3) , it’s less that girls ‘*dislike ‘hard maths’’* more that they’re relatively so much better at language based subjects they naturally chose those, naturally because most people choose what they’re best at.
Easy to say that and not go into why that could be the case. Sounds like the social mobility head is wholly inept and needs to be replaced. You can’t just say girls don’t like maths without looking into the reasons.
Rampant attention-seeker Katharine Birbalsingh is at it again I see.
That guy needs a different goddamn job… what an uneducated-arse. and I do not care how many initials he has after his fucking name.
[deleted]
Anyone else basically okay with maths but really couldn’t grasp physics? At A level I got an easy A at the former but got told to swing my hook at the latter.
From experience in a somewhat rural/green belt area, my year in 6th had 9 students, 8 b 1 g, she didn’t stay for long. And I don’t blame her, I barely did. That’s not really a comment on the content, it’s not that bad really if you enjoy it anyway, a big factor. maths in physics is not that bad really.
But it does conjure unbearable personalities
I’m sure no one could have predicted this, how could there be differences between different genders? It’s like each gender adapted in different way for different req.
Physics A-level has basically no actual maths. They make up fake nonesense to substitute for actual maths as they’ve tried so hard to take the actual maths out of it. This is just journalist nonesense.
I’m a chemistry A level teacher. There’s also ‘hard maths’ in that. All my classes are over 60% girls and they have no issues with maths.
I do agree there is an issue with girls choosing physics. But its not the math
I remember the girls in my A-level physics/maths courses were fairly diverse in terms of social circle. From the nerdy ones you’d expect, to the uber social and popular ones. Pretty sure they’re all doing very well for themselves now, and bloody good for them.
I think many people shun these subjects because they are hard, but boys are encouraged to go for it anyway as a sort of challenge, whereas girls either don’t have that reinforcement or are discouraged in favour of softer subjects.
Therefore you end up with a gender imbalance because outside of the people that want to be there, you have more boys who are conditioned to be there to prove themselves.
My daughter took maths, physics and biology at A-level. After a couple of months they told her she had to drop physics because she wasn’t good enough at the maths. Rather than help her improve they kicked her off the course. Probably to maintain their results.
She ended up going in a completely different direction but it’s that sort of thing that will harm young women who try to study physics.
God I’m so tired of this argument in the comments. People choose. Women choose to go to social sciences.
There’s more women than boys now at university too. Why is there still complaining? You literally have free choice to both sections of the sex at what ultimately is, an even playing field. With countless studies showing girls outclass boys. Why are we expecting equality of outcome at the end, when the results are completely different.
weird, when I was doing physics A-level 2009-2011, they removed the requirement to do an A-level maths alongside it and removed all aspects of calculus from the course, i.e., they removed all the hard maths!
This inadvertently made the course annoying to deal with as some of the proofs and explanations were more contrived and obscure. The girls liked the mechanics in the Maths A-level on the other hand which had plenty of ‘difficult’ maths.
The Physics is harder than the maths, as someone with a Physics degree, people tend to do better when the exams are maths focused (“show that this equation comes out after differentiating” for 3 pages kind of questions) as opposed to Physics problem solving focused questions. For example, vector mechanics is easy mathematically, but knowing how to set up the formula for the context at hand is the difficult part.
Sometimes people blur the distinction between problem solving and maths so they may actually mean the opposite when expressing their distaste for the subject.
I’m a Polish waitress (I know, how stereotypical of me). I regularly teach British educated teens and people in their 20s how to work out 10% of something. Their minds are BLOWN when I tell the you just move the decimal point. If they don’t even know how to divide numbers by 10 no fucking wonder they’re staying away from subjects that require math skills. And this 100% a failure of our educational system, not their own choice.